For the assignment Quick Cuts 3, I chose to answer Question A. Question A asks the following: “ Does the concept of narratology influence spectator's experience(s) of a movie? If so, how? If not, why?” I think that narratology does influence the spectator’s experience of a movie. Narratology is the study of stories and their structure. It studies how the story structure effects our perceptions, cognitions, and emotions as spectators. How stories are set up and told affect how we view an understand them.
Stories can be set up in chronological order (like love stories), which allows to know what is happening and when it happened throughout the entire film. Stories can also be set up in reverse chronological order (like murder mysteries), where you see the ending first and are left to figure out the timeline of events thorughout the film. Stories can be set up where there are flashbacks to previous events throughout the film, to give the spectator context to the character’s lives outside of the story’s plot. The point is that there is such a wide variety of ways that stories can be structured in order to effect how we, the spectators experience the movie and what opinions we form about the movie.
For example, if you’re watching a movie that is structured in chronological oder, you typically see the events in the order that they happen. While this isn’t as gripping as reverse chronological order, the sturcture still makes people want to stay and watch the etirety of the movie to understand what happens from Point A to Point B. If you’re watching a movie that is structured in reverse chronological order, you typically see the ending of the movie first, you are hooked into the movie. You are sucked into watching the rest of the movie to see the events of what happened. The way that the story is structured sucks the spectator in, it makes the spectator want to stay through the entirerty of the movie. Even though the spectator knows how it ends, they don’t know the events between the beginning and the ending, so they stay. If you’re wathcing a movie that is set up to give flashbacks throughout the movie, that entices the spectator to stay. The spectator is intrigues to find out why they are being shown flashbacks, why these flashbacks in particular, what do these flashabcks have to do with the storyline, etc. I think an easier way to explain it is to compare it to photograohy. Like movies, photography is all about angles, shots, and perspectives. The way that a shot is set up, or narrated, effects how it is seen by spectators. One one side of a field there could be a bunch of tractors, or a road with cars driving by, or other people that are not the main focus. However, if you angle the camera a certain way, all of those obejcts can still be there but they can’t be seen in the photo. The way you set up shots can also make everyday objects seem like something else. For example, a colander can be used to create design’s on a subjects face with sunlight instead of using artifical lighting or fitlers.
It isn’t just photography and movies. Throughour our entire lives, our persepctives change based on how stories, movies, pictures, etc are set up. The narrative effects how we see things. Therefore, to answer this question, yes I think that the concept of narratology does influence the spectator's experiences of a movie, as well as other thigns in life.
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